ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses theory in educational research and practice. With detailed reference to George Orwell’s work, theoretical issues are explored and their implications are considered. Orwell’s correspondence in the early and mid-1930s reveals the kind of writer he wanted to become. He wanted to create ‘good writing’ whilst also depicting his subject ‘from the inside’. He distinguished between ‘form’ and ‘content’ in a letter to Brenda Salkeld, in December 1933, also stating that a good story should contain ‘good writing, which can exist as it were in vacuo and independent of subject’. The chapter presents some of Orwell’s fictional writing about faces. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophy of signs radically problematises the signifier-signified distinction. Rather than marking a distinction between words and the world, signs alert o states of change and are themselves part of that change.
